The Asian carp are coming! We have to separate the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins to stop them! That last line isn't as easy to yell as the first, but it's a common refrain among environmental groups and politicians in the Great Lakes region. Now a binational commission is saying the same thing, minus the exclamation points.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Groups representing states and cities in the Great Lakes region today proposed spending up to $9.5 billion on a massive engineering project to separate the lakes from the Mississippi River watershed in the Chicago area, describing it as the only sure way to protect both aquatic systems from invasions by destructive species such as Asian carp...Read more.

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And finally, Sarah Gilman with High Country News reflects on the startling beauty to be found in the world's most desolate - and seemingly hopeless - landscapes:

It is a dead place — boned with black, sentinel tree trunks, veined with unspeakably polluted water, laid bare under a paste-white sky. There is no sense of space or time, only pure, absolute quiet.

It is one of my favorite images — Uranium Tailings No. 12, taken at Ontario’s Elliot Lake in 1995, part of photographer Edward Burtynsky’s troubling series documenting the ravages of mining. The most disturbing part of the work is the beauty apparent in all that ugliness: the molten orange of water tainted by nickel tailings, the taupe and gray shades of soil — smooth and tender-looking as skin — swept clean of living mess...Read more.